1.
Introduction
Police shootings in the United
States result in a significant number of fatalities each year. The
relationship between Police and Public has become tenous due to these
shooting fatalities. The exact number of people killed by police in the
US varies by year, but it typically ranges from several hundreds to over
thousands.
In recent years, there has been
growing concern about the number of people killed by police and the use
of excessive force by law enforcement. This has led to increased
scrutiny of police departments and calls for reforms to address these
issues. Some of the proposed reforms include changes to police training,
improved accountability measures, and the use of alternative forms of
conflict resolution.
It’s important to note that while
the number of police shootings and related fatalities has received
significant attention in recent years, the vast majority of police
interactions with the public do not result in the use of deadly force.
Police officers are trained to use force only when necessary to protect
themselves or others, and the vast majority of officers use force
responsibly and in accordance with the law.
In conclusion, police shootings and
fatalities resulting from such shootings remain a significant problem in
the United States and continue to be a subject of public concern and
political debate.
2. About
dataset
For the analysis of the US Police
Shootings Data we have been using a dataset provided from a research
project called The Mapping Police Violence. This project collects data
on all police killings, including those that are rules justified as well
as those that are found to be unjustified from the year of 2013 to
2022.
The MPV dataset includes
information on the victim, such as their race and age, as well as
details about the circumstances of the killing, including the type of
weapon used and the reason for the police interaction. The dataset also
includes information on the officers involved in the killing, including
their race department. But we are not going to study the details of
officers conducting the investigations and involved since the data is
inconsistent for the cases and might lead to biased conclusion. To avoid
that we will be focusing on victims and the situations to analyse if the
deadly force enforcement was justified or unjustified using different
visualizations to understand the trend of US Police Shootings
Fatalities.
3. Section 1 - Timeline and
Geographical Analysis of US Police Shootings
Fatalities
In this section, we are going to
study the trends of US Police shooting fatalities in US from 2013 to
2022 over the US geographical states to understand if cases throughout
are increasing eventually and to identify top impacted US
States.
3.1 What is the trend of Fatal US
Police Shootings over a period of 2013 to
2022?
In this task for the timeline of US
Police fatal shooting events occurred in the past decade, we wanted to
analyze if there’s a pattern in the number of killings by the police
from 2013 to 2022 in the USA. To implement this, we decided to plot a
Line chart showing the count of shooting cases that took place in the
past decade.
From the above line chart, we can
definitely depict that from 2013 there has been substantial increment in
the trend for US Police Shooting Fatal Cases. US Police have killed 59
more people through November in 2022 compared to the same period in the
previous year. This enable us to study the factors involved with these
cases further in this report.
3.2 Which are the top 3 highest US
police fatal shooting prone states?
In this task, to understand which
areas of the United States have higher shooting rates, we plotted the US
map to check for number of shooting cases reported in different states
of US.
From the above Map, we understood
that police have killed people in around 50 states with Texas, Florida
and California accounting for 31% of all the killings in the United
States from the year 2013 to 2022.
3.3 How are the US police shooting
cases intensity distributed over the decade for all the states in
US?
In this task, to understand the
number of killings in different states of the US in each year, we
plotted a heat map to analyze the intensity of killings in each state
for the last decade (2013 - 2022).
From the above Heat Map, we can
deduce the intensity of shooting events over past three years viz. 2022,
2021, 2020 has increased gradually by 30% and we can see shaded portions
more than we have seen from 2013 to 2018. This gives us fair idea along
with the highest report of cases in states California, Florida, and
Texas that there is increased intensity of these events over a period of
last decade.
4. Section 2 - US Police Shooting
Cases Personal Background Analysis
As we studied in the previous
section about the timeline and geographic locations of the Fatal US
Police Shooting Cases, from that analysis we have 3 top impacted states
with these events viz. California (CA), Florida (FL), & Texas (TX).
In this section, we will be studying different factors for further
analysis such as Age, Race, Mental Illness/Health, & Cause of Death
to understand some interesting findings related to these Fatal Shooting
Cases by US Police which will either support or forfeit the
controversies rumoring around the news in the public.
4.1 What is the age range which is
more susceptible to these Fatal Police Shooting events for top 3 states
in US?
In this task, to understand the age
range of victims in the top 3 highest impacted states of US we have
plotted a funnel chart to understand the more susceptible age range of
these US Police Fatal Shooting events. We have highlighted top 3 states
with different colors against the age range to get a fair idea about the
age ranges.
From the above funnel chart we can
definitely conclude that based on the data people in the range of 20-40
years are most likely to be the victim of Fatal US Police shootings
followed by people who are in the age group of 40-50. Seems like,
susceptibility risk peaks between the ages of 20 years and 35 years for
all 3 states in US.
4.2 What is the ethnicity of the
maximum US Police Fatal Shootings victims in the top 3 states?
In this task, to understand the
racial factor of the victims in the US Police Shooting events for which
we have plotted a pie-chart to have a overview of all the race’s people
involved in these events highlighted with the percent of Shooting cases
count.

From the above pie-chart, we can
conclude that cumulatively in all the top 3 highest US Police shooting
impacted states race “Hispanic” has been more prominently affected as of
now 33.3% and followed by people with “White” (32.6%) and “Black” (21%)
ethnicity. These numbers are bit indistinct to confirm if any racial
biased has been conducted during these events by the US
Police.
4.3 Are there any signs of Mental
Illness with the US Police Fatal Shooting Cases?
In this task, we will be analyzing
the mental health factor of the Fatal US Police Shooting Case victims to
understand if we can track any pattern of people being drugged or
suffering from mental health issues forcing US police to enforce the
deadly shooting actions. For this analysis we have plotted a Donut Chart
which will give us a percentage of people under drug/alcohol influence
or suffering from any mental health issues or being absolutely
sober/normal or unable to determine any of the given category for the
top 3 impacted states in US.

From
the above Donut Chart we can say that 61.9% of the US Police Fatal
Shooting Case victims were absolutely normal/sober and were not under
any drug/alcohol influence. Along with this, we have 18.9% of victims
having mental health issues and and 4.2% under drug/alcohol influence.
This could be alarming since for 61.9% of normal victims US Police opted
shooting them dead which leads to the following questions: 1.
Were these victims that dangerous to public being in normal
state?
2. Could US police have opted for
another action to get the situation under control for such
victims?
3. Is there any personal biased or
intention involved behind these deadly shooting events?
These all above questions remains
unanswered as we do not have enough data to support or contradict these
theories.
4.4 What is the major cause of
death for these US Police Fatal Shooting victims ?
In this task, we will be analyzing
the major cause of deaths in the Fatal US Police Shootings. We have
different “cause of death” categories with which we can come up with a
supporting theory that in each of the three states which category is
more prominent and evident from the circumstantial perspective. In this
analysis we have only considered the cause of death categories which
have significant number of shooting cases reported under them and
excluding the others since it will be difficult for us to analyse those
categories based of couple of cases reported.
## Scale for fill is already present.
## Adding another scale for fill, which will replace the existing scale.
From the above bar charts, we can
conclude that for major number of incidents “Gunshot” is the prominent
cause of death. From this we also conclude that police shootings and
incidents of police brutality contribute significantly to cycles of
distrust and community violence.
5. Section 3 - Circumstantial
Analysis of US Police Shootings Fatalities
From the previous sections, after
analyzing the victims personal background data for predicting the US
Police Fatal Shooting patterns and trends in this section, we will
analyse the situations of the US Police Shooting events. In our data set
we have data from Washington Post which is compiling a database of every
fatal shooting in the United States by a police officer in the line of
duty.The Post began tracking details about each police-involved killing
in the United States — the race of the deceased, the circumstances of
the shooting, whether the person was armed and whether the person was
experiencing a mental health crisis — by manually calling local news
reports, collecting information from law enforcement websites and social
media, and monitoring independent databases such as Fatal Encounters and
the now-defunct Killed by Police project. Though, this data is bit
inconsistent and not in good shape to be utilized for analysis but we
have considered couple of attributes from this data to support our
analysis through this report.
5.1 Did US Police received a call
for service during Fatal Shooting Events?
In this task, we have to analyze
whether US Police have received a call for service regarding any fatal
or dangerous incident being reported by the public on the basis of which
we can understand how action taken by US Police against victim is
justified. This theory wont be summing up to the final conclusion since
many other factors can also be influencing the circumstances apart from
the Call For Service attribute.
From the above Clustered Bar
Charts, we can see maximum times a Call For service has been made and US
Police was able to reach the incident location to help the public. But
from the, same graph we there were significant cases where call for
service was not made and still US Police has shot victim dead. This
could be bit ambiguous to come up with some fine conclusion how US
Police has been informed about the incidents in the cases where Call for
service is not requested.
5.2 What was the threat level from
Shooting Case victim?
In this task, from the Washington
Post itself we have the data for Threat Levels from Shooting Victims
which could lead US Police to shot them dead on-spot to take the
situation under-control. For this we have made an spread analysis if the
Shooting Event victim was really threatful according to the
circumstances to the US Police.

From the above spider chart, we can
clearly see the threat level from Shooting event victim was more since
for “Attack” category for all the top 3 states we have threat level more
than or equal to 50%. We can see threat level for attack was maximum in
California (100%) followed by Texas (75%) and Florida (50%).With this
threat level US Police shooting the criminal dead could be the
appropriate action but again there could be another action of control to
have a situation under the US Police control.
5.3 What is the relation between
encounter type and flee status of the Shooting Case victim?
In this last section of the report
we will be doing the final analysis to figure out the relation between
the attributes Encounter Type and Flee Status (Obtained from Washington
Post) using Alluvial Diagram for the top 3 highest impacted states in
US.

From the above alluvial chart, for
most of the encounter_type categories - Shooting Case victim did not
tried escaping from the incident location. But on the other hand,
encounter type categories such as Traffic Stop, Part 1 Violent Crime and
Other Non-violent offense victims did tried escaping from the incident
location. In this scenario for both the cases, threat level and escaping
could be the major factors involved in that circumstances for US Police
to shot victim dead.
6.
Conclusion
From the Mapping Police Violence
dataset, we covered three major aspects based on Geographical and Yearly
Timelines, the Personal background of the victims who were killed in
different states of the US, and Circumstantial Analysis on the basis of
threat level, encounter type, and call for service.
To start with, we plotted a Line
chart to understand a pattern in the number of killings from 2013 to
2022 and thus we observed that the shootings have increased gradually
throughout these years with 2022 being at its peak for the most recorded
killings.Further, we plotted a geographical map of the USA to see which
states were largely affected due to the shootings. California, Texas,
and Florida were the top-most affected states due to Police shootings.
In order to further analyze the killings in different states with
respect to each year, we plotted a heat map to understand the intensity
of killings in each state of the US.
For the second section, we focused
on the personal background of the victims on the basis of their age,
gender, and race. To understand the killings of shooting case victims,
we did an age analysis for the top 3 most affected states using a Funnel
chart. We observed that the risk of being killed by police peaks between
the ages of 20 and 35 years for men and women. Further, we tried to
study if Race has been an important parameter for US killings using a
Pie chart to plot the number of incidents based on Race. From this, we
understood that police officers are significantly more likely to kill
Black and Hispanic civilians, followed by their White peers, even when
civilians are unarmed and do not exhibit mental illness. With this we
can conclude to say racism is not that pivotal from this dataset to
support the controversy of Racial Discrimination by US Police. The later
of section our goal was to understand how shooting cases were analyzed
by Mental health. For this, we used a Doughnut Chart to understand the
mental condition of the victim and to gauge if he/she was under the
influence of alcohol or drugs at the time of the attack.Moving further,
it was important to know the major causes of shootings in each state. To
understand this, we used Bar charts that represented the major causes
such as Gunshots, Beaten, vehicles, tasers, and Physical Restraint with
respect to California, Florida, and Texas as these were the top-most
affected states. From our analysis, we observed that the majority of the
killings were due to Gunshots. From this we conclude that maximum number
of normal/sober people have been killed during the shooting event via
Gunshot and we propose to have a special training of US Police officers
to get situation under control without enforcing the deadly
actions.
In the last section of our report
we intend to find if US Police was called for service at the incident
location which shows the efficiency of the US Police to attend the crime
locations. Along with that, we also tried to analyse the threat level
from criminals who were shot dead during the event to see if US Police
was reluctant on shooting thewm dead or was their any other intentions
involve to influence. From that we conclude to say that the threat level
of Attack was maximum in all the top 3 states where US Police shot the
criminal dead. We also tried finding a relation between encounter type
and flee status since experts, law enforcement groups, and the US
Department of Justice recommend that police be banned from shooting at
people in moving vehicles. These shootings are particularly ineffective
and dangerous, since shooting the driver can make the vehicle an
uncontrollable threat to both officers and the public. Despite this,
most police departments continue to allow officers to shoot people in
these situations. Our analysis suggests a substantial proportion of all
killings by police could have been prevented and that specific policies
and practices might prevent police killings in the future.